hearing impaired

Part 2, of Project: Closed Caption was motivated in part by the first posting/experience. After editing the closed captions (CC) on my last video I made this video in response. Since I had the CC experience I started watching the videos with the CC on and noticed how many of those videos had mistakes.

I don’t think many of the content creators give it much thought because the mistakes are there. From simple grammatical errors to omissions, to adding in text never said. Very eye-opening. It bothered me to see it and I wanted to attempt to get others creators to check their CC.

I made a video challenging others to watch and proofread their most viewed video in 5 minutes of total silence. Not sure if it will work to motivate others to do it but it’s worth a try. If you read this, please share the video with others and challenge them to the Silence Challenge. -13

Words matter, in a world of silence. What an experience. Talk about an eye-opening, paradigm shift. Less that three days ago now I was editing a video posted to YouTube. At some point I somehow turned on the Closed Captions. Not sure how. Doesn’t matter. Here is what does.

I was ignoring them. Then I noticed “…morons…” in one of the captions on screen. I don’t use the word “morons” so that got my curiosity up. I watched more of the captions and was surprised how inaccurate it could be. That led me to discover that the captions had been automatically generated. I also discovered that I could edit them to correct the mistakes.

Once I figured out how to make the edits, I thought I’d pick a short video and give it a try. That is when the paradigm shift happened. It was late at night, no sounds in the house or outside. As I was reading them I was drawn into a world of total silence. Imagining that I could hear nothing and that I depended on the words I’m reading to be accurate. Not leave anything out. It would be the only way I would get anything out of, or make sense of the video.

Thinking about that stuck me. Imagine trying to follow along with the video, and have to watch the video and read along but the words you are reading are wrong or missing. It’s like having subtitles in a language you don’t understand. Useless!

It suddenly became a top priority to go back through all of the videos I’ve posted and edit the closed captions. There were so many mistakes. It’s not surprising with all the slang and my accent. I’ll bet that’s why YouTube doesn’t like some of my videos, the auto generated text.

Still not caught up, the project has taken hours and is committed to editing all of our videos with relevant audio. A number of the mistakes are saved below. Some of the best ones aren’t here because I didn’t think of writing this blog until I was a few hours into the project.

Many of them, funny, simple mistakes. Others, complex misinterpretations. Wait until you read them. Some of them will require reading over a few times to comprehend the misquote like this one. “Honey that stools that seat in there is trying to germinate well, okay” – “Okay, that soil, that seed in there is trying to germinate.” The misquote, then the correction. See what I mean?

Read on for a laugh or two, but remember what its like to have to read through it and try to have the same video experience everyone that has hearing does. That was an eye-opening experience, we’ll never again post a video without checking the closed captions. I might make a video to challenge others who post videos to do the same. We’ll see. -13